Theater: Are We as Undiscerning as the English Think We Are?

You have to pity the English snob. What American vulgarity is there left to sneer at? Surely they can’t disparage our lowbrow popular culture with their own glut of dopey reality shows and salacious soap operas. The Brits also recently adopted grubby American-style political debates, and poor Gordon Brown must grovel after insulting a pensioner. It’s sad, really, but at least there’s the theater—as those foolish Americans spell it.

In yesterday’s Guardian, Michael Billington, the premiere drama critic in London, adopts an adorably old-fashioned superior attitude in explaining that news that Lucy Prebble’s Enron is closing is evidence that producers of serious drama should not look to Broadway. I had a different take on the failure of the show, but I recommend Billington’s post since it exemplifies an unthinking British snobbery that belongs in a museum. Raise a cup of tea and read it aloud in the voice of the politician from Yes, Minister for maximum nostalgic enjoyment.

He says there are three reasons why Enron failed: The mighty New York Times (for which I write about theater)gave it a bad review; America worships realism; and audiences didn’t like an English writer tackling an American subject. Of course prominent reviews matter, although someone should tell Billington that print media is not doing so well these days, and the idea that no one has questioned the power of the Times since David Hare is pretty selective history. It also may be true that some Americans were skeptical about a foreigner’s take on the Houston energy company, but the play gave us good reason to be.

Billington thought Prebble’s vaudevillian silliness was “a visual embodiment of the dream-like illusion to which the Texan energy giant, and similar corporations, surrendered.” What’s odd about this reading is how it lets the criminals behind the Enron scandal off the hook. They didn’t surrender to an illusion like some delicate Tennessee Williams heroine. They were fiercely smart businessmen out for personal gain. I thought we gee-whiz Americans were supposed to be the naïve ones.

But his second point is the most provocative: blaming the lack of success of the play on the “aesthetic conservatism of a theater culture that likes plays rooted in a realist tradition.” Enron employs music and puppets and video and other things found in many American dramas, but such daring flights of fancy completely flummoxed audiences here because it’s an “entrenched American view” that visual pyrotechnics are only allowed in musicals while plays must follow the “realist rules.”

Let’s be sporting and assume he got carried away here and meant to limit his critique to Broadway. After all, any serious observer of the theater scene knows that American experimental troupes like the Wooster Group and the Builders Associations employ spectacular visual stagecraft and Off Broadway companies like the Civilians and Les Freres Corbusier would never be accused of playing by “realist rules.”

Still you have to wonder: Didn’t the same giant video screens of Enron make an appearance in The History Boys, an English play that did quite well on Broadway? Would Billington call the language of August Wilson and David Mamet realistic? When Billington uses rugby slang – “kicked in touch,” meaning rejected—to describe how writers like Edward Albee are no longer wanted by Broadway when they write more daring work, I can only assume he’s being willfully obscure so that American audiences who saw Albee’s Tony-winning drama The Goat will not call him on his error.

Just a few months ago, playwright Martin McDonagh, who lives in London, told me in an interview that the English theater was dominated by bland drawing-room comedies and political plays with dueling essays masquerading as characters. McDonagh said that moving from New York to London is like going from the World Cup to “Greek second division.” I laughed and defended the English theater scene, explaining that he was trafficking in outdated clichés. While there are clearly differences (You cannot, for instance, see The Mousetrap in Times Square), Broadway and the West End have much in common, in part because we import each other's biggest hits. It may be the case that one of the last things the English have left to really distinguish themselves is their snobbery. It’s a glorious tradition. I raise my nose in honor.